| A bit off topic but interesting nonetheless, I'll take a crack at it. I see an important distinction between pseudoscientific crankery and just bad/refuted science. I've read some of the 5g corona stuff; it's batshit insane, like I'm fairly sure the primary sources on it have serious mental illnesses. Any physicist with a mailing address can tell you all about cranks. Refuting cranks is not a part of their job, if they do that, they won't have time for anything else. I don't think the gain-of-function paper has been comprehensively refuted, yet. It's certainly been dismissed, dissed, and evidence is strongly pointing in the direction of it being refuted. But it was written by a credentialed virologist, and more importantly, it is in the process of being submitted through channels. Will it survive peer review and be published? Probably not, and that's what peer review is for. As far as I'm able to determine, it's just a bad paper, but it's real science, not a parody of science. Banning such people sends the wrong message. We rationally should update our priors in the direction of a conspiracy to suppress the truth. I'm no virologist, but I've spend enough time in genetics labs to be able to follow along with their conversations. What I can't do, is tell the difference between a shadowy ChiCom conspiracy to suppress the truth, and overzealous enforcement of a vague mandate to ban disinformation about the novel coronavirus. I mean. I know some people who work for Twitter; it's the latter, you'll never go broke presuming institutional dysfunction as the cause of any malaise on the birdsite. And yeah, I don't think the 5g whackjobs should be banned either, but for a different reason: they'll just go find another forum where people like me won't be around to tell them how full of shit they are. The only think worse than a weird cult of people who believe schizo stuff is a weird isolated cult of people who believe schizo stuff. |